France's Sarkozy may find it perfectly swell that an "al Qaeda asset," Adbelhakim Belhadj, is commander of rebel forces in Tripoli, a story gradually seeping into MSM consciousness. According to the Asia Times' Pepe Escobar, however, Belhadj, founder and "emir" of the previously (presently?) al-Qaeda-allied Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), is not alone. He is one of many such jihad commanders. Escobar writes:

Hardly by accident, all the top military rebel commanders are LIFG, from Belhaj in Tripoli to one Ismael as-Salabi in Benghazi and one Abdelhakim al-Assadi in Derna, not to mention a key asset, Ali Salabi, sitting at the core of the TNC. It was Salabi who negotiated with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi the "end" of LIFG's jihad, thus assuring the bright future of these born-again "freedom...

Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the man who twice upheld death sentences in the Bulgarian nurses show trial and is poised to lead post-Qaddafi Libya. But don't worry: The State Department says he's a refomer.

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While making a correction in my column regarding Libyan "rebel" front man Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the former Qaddafi justice minister who now heads Libya's government-in-waiting, the National Transitional Council (NTC), I realized that US and NATO support for this man and the NTC and the "rebels" is actually worse than I previously thought, which was already pretty bad.

I don't refer only to the role Abdul Jalil played in the Bulgarian nurses show trial, which I mistakenly underestimated: I originally wrote that Abdul Jalil sentenced the five nurses and Palestinian medic to death when, in fact, as president of the Tripoli appeals court, he twice upheld their death sentences. Indeed, for these blatant perversions of justice (charges that the nurses had infected hundreds of...

Here are three things Americans need to know about the Libyan "rebels" the U.S. government isn't telling us.

One: The inspiration of the Libyan war is as much anti-Western as it is anti-Gadhafi.

The "Day of Rage" that kick-started the Libyan war on Feb. 17 marked the fifth anniversary of violent protests in Benghazi, which included an assault on the Italian consulate during which at least 11 were killed. The 2006 mayhem, as John Rosenthal has reported, during which consulate staff was evacuated after 1,000 to several thousand men tried to storm and burn the building, may be linked to the Italian TV appearance two days earlier of Italian minister Roberto Calderoli. It was then that Calderoli, in defiance of worldwide Islamic rioting against cartoons of Muhammad in a tiny Danish newspaper, revealed he was wearing an undershirt decorated with such a cartoon. In remarks widely reported in Arab media, Calderoli explained that "the gesture was a matter...

This is a map of known U.S. oil reserves. Oil production in any of these regions require no drone attacks, no NATO bombing raids, and no special forces on the ground. This would save US taxpayers at least $1 billion, the US price tag to date for installing a jihad-heavy government in Libya, the ninth largest oil state in the world.

A crazy policy, an evil policy, or both.

Now the fun begins: The division of (sp)oil among NATO.

Will Italy be the odd-ally out? Reuters featured analysis this week that considered the question.

It's important to remember the insurrection in Libya started in February with a "Day of Rage" commemorating a violent, 2006 protest against freedom of speech in Italy. Specifically, this was a post-Friday-prayers attack on the Italian consulate in Benghazi to protest an Italian minister's defiance...

In the Iraq War on Defendants, killers go free. Captain John McKenna, left, was shot and killed by an Iraqi sniper while helping mortally wounded Lance Cpl. Michael Glover. The sniper responsible for both of their deaths was recently released by an Iraqi court. Today, the McKenna and Glover families marked their fifth anniversary of their deaths with a memorial in Rockaway.

The families had been assured that "as long as there is a Marine in Iraq, the sniper will remain in jail." Their already overwhelming loss has been compounded by the failure of the Defense Department to inform them that Muhammad (Big Ears) Awwad Ahmad had been released.

As if that three-dollar-bill-phony pdf of a long-form birth certificate weren't alarming enough (browse through this archive and tell me you don't have any questions about its veracity), now it seems that Barack H. Obama, the 44th president of the USA, has an "alias" -- as discovered and documented by debt-collection and "skip-trace expert" Albert Hendershot. And that alias -- Harrison J. Bounel -- is currently being scrubbed from professional databases.

A FoxNews.com poll on whether readers trust the Libyan "rebels" cues up thus:

Another Arab country appears to be on the cusp of deposing its leader. The rebel-led Transitional National Council is poised to topple Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Do you think we can we trust the rebels?

This is an interesting question on more than one level. Given the extent to which Fox News has been depicting the Libyan "rebels" as our horse to ride against Qaddafi to "victory" -- with stories today emphasizing a drop in oil prices due to "rebel" gains and a not-so-subtle plug...

Italian minister Roberto Calderoli shows off a Mohammed cartoon on a T-shirt on Italian TV in 2006. In response, thousands took to the streets in Benghazi, ten people died in the ensuing violence directed at the Italiian embassy, Calderoli resigned, and today, five years later, that Spriti of 2006 has taken Tripoli.

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From the beginnings of fighting in Libya, John Rosenthal has owned the English-language reporting on the "rebels" -- a remarkable feat for an independent journalist competing with Goliath Media.

With anti-Qadaffi forces now in Tripoli, it's worth revisiting what may be Rosenthal's singlemost clarifying report on the jihadists roots of the insurrection, which go back to a violent Benghazi outpouring in 2006 against the West -- against freedom of speech and the Danish Mohammed cartoons. In these Libyan protests, which Rosenthal describes...

With non-Constitutionally-US-supported anti-Qadaffi forces taking Tripoli today, it looks as if -- to be as delicate as a NATO commander -- the "flickers" of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah have won. In franker words, America's jihadist allies, a significant presence among the Libyan "rebels," are now rising to power in Libya. In more startling terms, the same people who fought with al Qaeda against Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan (and committed unreported atrocities in Libya), are now, thanks to the US taxpayer, very likely about to run or at least help run a state with the ninth largest oil reserves in the world.

But don't worry. Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman was in Benghazi all weekend, making sure everything works out all right.

On the Afghan border with Pakistan, in Paktika province, is a tiny, isolated and primitive American outpost called Combat Outpost (COP) Margah. What happened there last fall never penetrated mainstream consciousness, but on Oct. 30, American forces were surprised by a wee-hours attack by hundreds of unusually sophisticated fighters who were "armed to the teeth and shouting 'Allah Akbar.'" Or so David Axe reported, quite vividly, in Wired magazine, the lone outlet to cover the battle.

It took 12 apocalyptic hours, but the insurgents were successfully repelled. Of course, this wasn't the first time this outpost in eastern Afghanistan or its defenders were attacked. Others have even occurred during U.S. missions into town to "show our faces," as one soldier put it,...

Gen. David Petraeus, June 23, 2011, in confirmation hearings before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee

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In an April 2011 column, I argued that both Barack Obama and the COINdinista Right had good (for them) reasons to perpetuate wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama's reason is obvious. He doesn't want the nation to watch Iraq and Afghanistan falling apart during the 2012 election year. I wrote:

And falling apart -- I call it reverting to type - is the inevitable result of U.S. withdrawal. "Who lost Iraq and Afghanistan?" is not a question Obama wants to answer during the election.

Thus, Obama will slog on with counterinsurgency in stalemate, maintaining his weirdly logical...

Gen. Petraeus bestowing medals at COP Margah on the Afghan border with Pakistan in October 2010

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Command Outpost (COP) Margah didn't make "the news" back in October 2010 when there was an attack by hundreds of jihadists "armed to the teeth and shouting `Allah akbar' as they stormed the outpost," as Wired rather colorfully reported.

No, not even after Gen. Petraeus called the battle to defend this outpost in Paktika province along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border "one for the history books." Petraeus made that comment when he helicoptered in ten days after the fighting to distribute medals among these valorous soldiers. If the commanding general mentioned what national purpose they had served in successfully defending this tiny outpost on the moon, that didn't get picked up either. But I doubt that he did -- because there isn't any. There were no American deaths at this battle of Margah, which may be what made it so memorable.

Not so at COP Keating in October 2009, when 300 Taliban fighters breached a similarly tiny and isolated outpost near Kamdesh in a furious battle that left five eight Americans dead. In July 2008, a similar attack on a tiny, isolated and unsupported outpost near Wanat left nine US troops dead. These are some of the unreckoned costs of dysfunctional COIN theory, which the COINdinistas who run the US military relied on to insert these tiny outposts deep in hostile territory like pins on a map. Their mission was to serve as "hearts and minds" welcome wagons. After the men had to circle the wagons to escape with their lives, at least most of them, these outposts were closed. No Big Fish paid any price for what was deemed an intelligence failure; only small fry.

The space constraints of the newspaper column prevented me from listing in my most recent column exactly what topics the CIA did not consider "as current and comprehensive as possible," thereby pulling the plug on last week's scheduled 3-day Homegrown Radicalization conference. Or was it pressure from CAIR?

1) "Homegrown Radicalization and Recruitment" regarding the Lackawanna Six

2) "History of Islamic Extremism in the US"

3) "From Hatred to Harmony," a presentation by a former SkinHead leader and Neo-Nazi recruiter

This week, a three-day conference hosted by the CIA on "homegrown radicalization" was supposed to have taken place at CIA headquarters. It did not. The conference was abruptly canceled -- or, softening the blow, "postponed." Question: Did pressure from what we might (and should) call a certain "homegrown radical" group -- the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) -- make this happen?

Here is what we know.

On Monday, July 18, CAIR issued a press release headlined: "CAIR Asks CIA to Drop Islamophobic Trainer." It revealed that CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad wrote a letter to now-former CIA director Leon Panetta to that effect. The rest of the release is more opaque. In referencing an NPR report that slammed one counterterrorism trainer by name, former FBI agent John Guandolo, for "allegedly...

Just days after 30 U.S. troops, including 22 Navy SEALs, died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, Adm. William McRaven took the helm of U.S. Special Operations Command in a somber ceremony at MacDill Air Force Base.

McRaven, 55, who oversaw and helped plan the mission that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan earlier this year, replaces Adm. Eric Olson, 59, who is retiring after serving four years as SOCom's chief.

I've been keeping watch on the fiery vortex of British rioting at View from the Right, where Lawrence Auster is tracking events with a close and critical eye on the reportorial blind spot on race that has marked most if not all of the news coverage. (He has also been noting similar blind spots in Stateside reporting on this summer's spate of "flash mobs" in which the unifying theme of the flash-mobbers' race is omitted as a matter of course. The stories themselves, even the widespread black-on-white violence at last month's Wisconsin State Fair, have failed to penetrate the national MSM.)

Such omissions, seemingly designed not-to-make-things-worse, are an affront to reality. In London, rioting mobs in London and other British cities seem to be notably or even predominantly black -- or so we gather from opaque...

The Afghanistan blame game begins with Time magazine putting it out there, albeit gently:

The influx of troops, requested by General Stanley McChrystal, approved by President Barack Obama and overseen by General David Petraeus, brought stability to some areas in the south. And that is part of the narrative Petraeus, who has given up command of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan to become head of the CIA, wants as his legacy. But the surge — and other initiatives of the general — have not been the unalloyed successes they have been made out to be. Indeed, the downing of a U.S. CH-47 Chinook helicopter in Wardak province on Saturday, resulting in the single deadliest day for American troops in Afghanistan, shows how fragile the situation is.

As we mourn the loss of 30 US servicemen in Afghanistan today, among them members of beloved SEAL Team Six, the nature of the mission that they have been on, and that all of their fellow forces in the ISAF coalition have been on for nearly a decade, must come into focus if The Madness is ever to be brought to a stop.

To that end, I note another story of loss, this one from a Guardian report on yet another inquest into the death of yet another British marine. These uniquely British proceeedings prove to be a mainstay of detailed information on the proceedings of the war that are otherwise unavailable to us.

Corporal Stephen Curley, 26, died instantly when a roadside bomb detonated by a 14-year-old boy in Helmand last May.

His patrol's mission?

"The fatal patrol was organised as part of an effort to reassure local people concerned about their safety."

So, the COIN-bots strike again, seeking to win Afghan hearts and minds, but only losing Western lives. Will they...

Gates of Vienna carries a chilling update from the erudite and prolific Norwegian blogger Fjordman, some of whose vast body of work was cut and pasted into mass murderer Breivik's so-called manifesto. In the wake of a frenzy in Norway to identify the anonymous Fjordman, which has closely resembled a witch hunt, the 36-year-writer quite literally knocked on police doors of his own free will even though he knew that would end his anonymity. His account of what happened next follows:

I am shocked by the hostile treatment I received at the hands of the police.

Lars Hedegaard heard my story and commented that he had never known of any witness who has been treated in this manner in any Western country, except for totalitarian...

At the very end of this story lies the money quote on the thunking bankruptcy, military and political, of the American strategy in Afghanistan. It is the bankruptcy of Petraeus-McChrystal-Bush-Obama-Petraeus "population-centric COIN," as Brig. Gen. Lewis Craparotta of Task Force Leatherneck still calls it, and no, it hasn't been phased out.

From this week's Signon San Diego story:

The Camp Pendleton Marines fighting in Sangin from the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment repelled insurgent attempts to retake the town, Craparotta said, and they expanded west, east, and north toward the Kajaki dam. The dam is a strategic target of the insurgents because it supplies electricity to Helmand and Kandahar, and controls flooding in an area known as Afghanistan’s bread basket.

“We have gotten a little more breathing room for the population,” Craparotta said.

They are the forgotten warriors of the Iraq War, the men whose lives and families and careers blew up in "murder" charges on a vicious battlefield, the pieces coming down in Fort Leavenworth's military prison where the men now serve long sentences. Together, they make up the Leavenworth 10, not always at Leavenworth and not always 10, a group of cold-luck cases still working their way up the ladder of appeals and the clemency process, their families hoping to free them before many more years go by.

They all got bad news recently when word came that the Army Court of Appeals denied Army Ranger 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, 28, a new trial despite the introduction of exculpatory evidence originally withheld by the prosecution. Behenna faces 13 more years of a 15-year sentence for the unpremeditated 2008 "murder" of an insurgent who killed two of his men in post-surge Iraq, an al-Qaida terrorist for whom the Army would issue a kill/capture order before realizing he was already dead.

A court in Jordan has convicted the mentor of slain Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The Daily Star reports:

The Palestinian-born Isam Mohammad Taher al-Barqawi, better known as Sheikh Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, was found guilty of “plotting terrorism” and recruiting militants in Jordan to join the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was tried in a military court with three other Jordanian Palestinians.

Maqdisi, whom Zarqawi praised in Internet writings, shouted at the judges as the ruling was handed down.

“You are convicting us of wrongdoing for something that our religion condones, which is standing by fellow Muslims against...

In the wake of the arrest of the AWOL Pfc. Naseer J. Abdo for plotting to attack Ft. Hood a la Maj. Nidal Hasan, a San Antonio paper ran a story headlined: "Trust is a casualty after Abdo's arrest" -- as if it weren't already after the Hasan massacre. Anway, the quotation of the day comes from a female soldier who didn't want to be identified. Here is why:

“I believe it is more important to protect our armed forces than to potentially offend someone,” she added, declining to be identified for fear of retribution by her superiors.

Can we earmark those debt-ceiling defense cuts to make sure these "superiors" are fired?

An email from Scott and Vicki Behenna brings news of a national disgrace: The Army Court of Appeals has upheld Army Ranger Michael Behenna's conviction for killing a known al Qaeda member (whom Michael and Army intelligence believed blew up Michael's convoy) because Michael lost his right to self-defense when he pointed his weapon at the enemy in the war zone.

I wish this were a joke, but it's a tragedy -- for all.

To the thousands of Michael Behenna supporters,
We are pained to share with you that the Army Court of Appeals has upheld Michael’s conviction and denied him a new trial. The appeal process took over two years (six months longer than is allowed by law) and their ruling was an absolute punch in the gut to justice for a young man who fought so bravely for this country.
Back in March of 2009 the sting of Michael’ conviction...

The International Islamic News Agency (never heard of it before; get used to it a la "Gallup Abu Dhabi") reported on August 1, which, as the dateline notes, is also Ramadan 1 (or vice versa):

JEDDAH, Ramadan 1/Aug 1 (IINA)-During the next few months, Washington plans to host a coordination meeting to discuss with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) how to implement resolution no. 16/18 on combating defamation of religions, and how to prevent stereotypes depicting religions and their followers; as well as disseminating religious tolerance [sic], which has been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council last March, in agreement with Western countries.

Sgt. Derrick Miller, 27, of Hagerstown, MD, was convicted this past week of the premeditated murder of an Afghan man in 2010. The husband and father of two was assigned to a Connecticut National Guard unit and attached to the 101st Airborne Division at the time of the shooting in Eastern Afghanistan. After joining the National Guard in 2006, Miller had three combat deployments and had recently been promoted.